I have a lot of video content I would like to put into my iTunes Library in order to be able to watch them on my AppleTV and handbrake is a great way to encode them to do this, but unfortunately its a time consuming process to add them all into HandBrake manually and get that done.

So I figured I’d try and automate the process a little, I looked around online and found people talking about it but nobody had done the work of actually create an Automator action etc, so I first built a shell script that would do it but it was a little messy and didn’t allow for easy configuration etc. I recently learnt how to build automator actions so I saw this as great way to improve on this, so here we have a basic Automator action you can load into your workflows, services etc and it even allows you to select from a few different profiles choose the output directory and if you want to create a log file and if so where to put it.

I’ve only included a few profile options for now as I only really use AppleTV 2, but I may include a few more a bit later.

To use it you need to have the HandBrake CLI installed into /usr/bin (or anywhere else in your bash PATH for those in the know).

I’m working on some other cool actions to go along with this one to allow for complete automation of your encoding

This is licensed for non-commercial use and I would request that this not be hosted anywhere else but link to my site if you would like to share this one, thanks

Its still really just a beta, but I’ve tested it as much as I can so if you have any problems try encoding the video in Handbrake and if there is still an issue drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do

I’ve started a new blog to share some of the experiences I’ve picked up while doing some programming.

Currently its just a hobby and the stuff I do is generally started because of a desire to do a repetitive task more quickly. I’m a Mac user and I’ve recently being doing some cool stuff with Automator to allow me to automate the encoding of my videos to import them into iTunes. I’ll be sharing some of them here once they are in a state to be released to the general population